I mentioned in a post last week that I had been in a conversation about the historicity of Jesus that I was considered turning into a blog post. Instead I went into introspection mode and talked about my childhood neuroses. That’s the kind of variety you get here at RyanSutter.net, you lucky reader you.

Well, this week you get historical Jesus stuff. Enjoy.

The Problem

OK, so my first response when I was first introduced to the idea that Jesus might not have been a historical person was “Huh? Whatchoo talkin’ ’bout Willis?” I mean, everybody knew that Jesus was clearly a historical person, how else do you explain, um, Christianity??? Right? You with me? Yeah! I mean, it’s just so damn obvious! Jesus was real, the Gospels tell his story, maybe the miracles are exaggerations, but come on…

Not so fast pilgrim. To somewhat oversimplify for the sake of brevity there are three major schools of thought in historical Jesus studies. First, Jesus really existed and his actual teachings and words and life events are accurately recorded in the Gospels. Second, Jesus was a historical person, some sort of Messianic leader (military, religious, or other) but the Gospels are mythical stories that are either distortions or outright fabrications that only contain a subset of historical Jesus material. Third, Jesus is an entirely fictional character and it is only through ignorance on the part of later followers that he became “historical”.

The conversation I alluded to previously was one in which I was debating with a man named Karl in which he tended towards the second position and I the third. Very few outside of fundamentalist denominations take the first position among Bible scholars although obviously the general public considers Jesus historical and the Gospels acccurate. I’ll get into that conversation in a moment but I’ll start with the popular opinion that Jesus is a historical person and the Gospels are reliable historical documents.

The Case for Christ?

If you went to a book store or library to attempt to research the topic of the historicity of Jesus, a book you would almost certainly run across is Lee Strobel’s “The Case for Christ”. In this book, Mr. Strobel attempts to argue for the full-on literal historical truth of the Jesus story. His book is a good specimen of this species of argument, and I do own a copy, but not having it in front of me right now I’m going to draw on other sources that make the same arguments as Mr. Strobel.

Eyewitnesses

Certainly the strongest evidence possible that Jesus existed would be first hand eyewitness accounts of his life and deeds and there are indeed a few places in the Bible that seem to make the claim that they text is being written down either first or second hand.

In their book The Bible – God’s Word or Man’s? in chapter 5 The “New Testament”-History or Myth? the Watchtower Society states the following:

*** gm chap. 5 p. 58 par. 7 The “New Testament”-History or Myth? ***

many of the accounts speak of eyewitness testimony. The writer of the Gospel of John said: “This is the disciple [the disciple that Jesus loved] that bears witness about these things and that wrote these things.” (John 21:24) The writer of the book of Luke says: “Those who from the beginning became eyewitnesses and attendants of the message delivered these to us.” (Luke 1:2) The apostle Paul, speaking of those who witnessed the resurrection of Jesus, said: “Most of [them] remain to the present, but some have fallen asleep in death.”-1 Corinthians 15:6.

OK, so we have eyewitness accounts, that’s gotta count for something. Why would they make this stuff up, right? Especially when they could have been persecuted for it. What else is there, outside the Bible?

Josephus and His Gang

The Big Cahuna on historical Jesus beach, Josephus was a first century Jewish historian who wrote a few famous books that you can still get today including one entitled “The Antiquities of the Jews”. In this book is the most famous secular historical passage about Jesus. It says the following:

“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.”

Pretty good stuff, right? But that’s not all. He also confirms other things:

“To some of the Jews the destruction of Herod’s army seemed to be divine vengeance, and certainly a just vengeance, for his treatment of John, surnamed the Baptist. For Herod had put him to death, though he was a good man and had exhorted the Jews to lead righteous lives, to practise justice towards their fellows and piety towards God.”

And then there is:

“[The high priest Ananus] convened the judges of the Sanhedrin and brought before them a man named James, the brother of Jesus who was called the Christ, and certain others.”

This is all looking pretty good for a historical Jesus, right?

But let’s not forget Tacitus who wrote in his Annals:

“Christus, the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilatus, and the pernicious superstition was checked for a moment, only to break out once more, not merely in Judaea, the home of the disease, but in the capital itself.” – Tacitus, The Annals

There’s more! Seutonius writes:

“Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he [Claudius] expelled them from Rome.” – The Deified Claudius

Not to be out done, we have the attestation of Justin Martyr, which takes a little explaining:

*** gm chap. 5 pp. 62-63 par. 17 The “New Testament”-History or Myth? ***

Justin Martyr, writing in the middle of the second century, wrote in reference to the death of Jesus: “That these things did happen, you can ascertain from the Acts of Pontius Pilate.” In addition, according to Justin Martyr, these same records mentioned Jesus’ miracles, regarding which he says: “That He did those things, you can learn from the Acts of Pontius Pilate.” True, these “Acts”, or official records, no longer exist. But they evidently did exist in the second century, and Justin Martyr confidently challenged his readers to check them to verify the truth of what he said.

So, we have the words of eyewitnesses, which the Gospels are based on as well as several contemporary historians, one of whom even challenges his readers to verify the truth of his statement by checking official records! This is looking pretty good for Jesus being historical…

Absence of Evidence

…but, then again, sometimes things are not what they appear. Let’s examine each of these bits of evidence a little more closely.

John 21:24

The scripture in John appears to be straightforward. In the above quote it appears to indicate that the book of John was written by the Apostle John. Unfortunately, a complete and careful reading of this verse reveals that, alas, this is not the case:

John 21:24 (ASV) – “This is the disciple that beareth witness of these things, and wrote these things: and we know that his wit
ness is true.“

That last bit is important. The writer is clearly not John because John is being referred to in the third person by the author of the book. The author is clumsily betraying himself by saying, in essence, ‘hey, you can believe what’s in this book because John wrote it and we know he’s trustworthy’. Oops. Did I mention that the names Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were not assigned to the Gospel texts until decades after they were written and that none of them bear the name of their authors? These are anonymous texts and in this case, the text itself is really telling you “John didn’t write this”, if you pay attention. At the very least, this makes the book of John a second-hand account written by an anonymous author who claims John as an authority.

Luke 1:2

This one is a no-brainer. The author clearly states that he was not an eyewitness himself but that eyewitnesses and attendants to the message delivered the gospel to him. Another second-hand account, at best, anonymously written and anonymously attested to by unknown and unnamed “witnesses”.

1 Corinthians 15:6

Here we have something interesting at last. While Paul himself was not an eyewitness either to anything about Jesus either, he is not anonymous and he was definitely involved in very beginning of Christianity. In fact, this broader text (1 Cor. 15:3-11), if legitimate, is the oldest text in the Bible that tells of Jesus’ death and resurrection, the book of 1 Corinthians having been written somewhere around the year 55.

There are minor problems with this text that do give some doubt as to it’s authenticity (for a really long and in-depth discussion about this topic check out this article from Robert Price) so it is possible that this is was written centuries later and interpolated into text of 1 Corinthians. There is just no way to be sure. Regardless of whether or not this is the case, however, what we have again is a second-hand statement from a person who was not an eyewitness that is written approximately 22 years after the events supposedly took place. This could be a legitimate text, could be an interpolation, could really be Paul and he could be making it up, there is just honestly no way to tell. I tend to think that Dr. Price is onto something with his analysis of this as an interpolation, but as I said, it still doesn’t help us with finding the actual eyewitnesses to history.

In short, there are no verifiable first hand accounts of the life of Jesus in the Bible. Only second and third hand stories written decades after the fact by anonymous writers. So while some of the Bible writers claimed to have gotten their information from third parties who they trusted, none claim to have themselves been eyewitnesses. Jesus himself never wrote down a single word, of course. All of the texts in the Christian section of the Bible related to the life of Jesus (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) are written by third parties based on the claims of other people who may or may not have been eyewitnesses to something. The most that can be made of the references in John, Luke and Paul is that the writers of those verses either believed that eyewitnesses existed or wanted others to believe that they did.

This leads to the problem with “eyewitnesses”. I could tell you today that my son and I saw a red-tailed hawk eating a squirrel in my front yard last year. I could then try to shore up my claim by stating that a couple of people walking by my house saw it too. You can believe my claim or not believe my claim, but let’s say you did. Now let’s say you told somebody that you knew somebody who saw a red-tailed hawk eat a squirrel in his front yard. Do you really know that story is true? You don’t. How do you know who these witnesses are? You don’t. Even if I provided you with a witness, how do you know they are reliable? You don’t. So, how much stock can be put in the few places where the writers of different books claim to have gotten their information from witnesses? Precious little. Don’t forget, witnesses vouched that they had seen Joseph Smith’s gold tablets too. Witnesses claimed to see the sun shake in the sky at Fatima in 1917. What is easier to believe, that somebody lied (something that happens billions of times a day throughout the world) or that somebody was resurrected from the dead (something nobody has ever seen happen). BTW, the hawk-squirrel story IS true and I have pictures to prove it. I don’t need no witnesses… and I don’t have any but me and Syd. I invented the other “witnesses”, but you couldn’t prove that could you?

OK, so how about the extra-Biblical sources? What about Josephus and Company? Aren’t those good sources? People without a “dog in the hunt” as they say?

Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Justin Martyr

In the case of Josephus, it is almost a dead certainty that he didn’t write the first passage I quoted (the one that starts “Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man if it be lawful to call him a man”). It is hard to prove a negative, but there is very strong evidence that this was added to the text of Josephus in the 4th century, probably by Eusebius. Certainly there is no evidence of it having existed prior to that time. A lot of time and effort has been spent arguing whether or not this passage is authentic. I don’t believe it is, but in my opinion it’s irrelevant because it was written, at a bare minimum of 61 years after the death of Jesus by a person who was born 4 years after the event. If it is an interpolation, it probably dates to centuries after the time of the founding of Christianity. This is not a contemporary account, this is something written by a person who was not connected with the events and was simply reporting what he had been told. In our modern world in which we have video, audio, encyclopedias, the Internet and a million ways to document and chronicle events in ridiculous detail, there is still considerable debate over events that have transpired even a few short years earlier. Emails circulate with disinformation about political candidates, without Snopes we wouldn’t even be able to tell whether or not 80% of what we get forwarded from our mother-in-laws is legit. What kind of true authenticity could we expect even a hard-working, conscientious, historian working in the 1st century to manage when he was writing about things that took place before his birth over 60 years previously?

Perhaps Josephus believed what he wrote, but the point is that he wasn’t in any position to know as all the events he described took place before he was born.

It gets worse with Tacitus. Tacitus was born 19 years after Josephus and wrote his Annals in the year 109, a full 76 years after the time of Jesus supposed death. Again, not a contemporary, not a witness to anything, just a reporter writing long long after the events.

And then we get to Suetonius who, you won’t be surprised, was born another decade and a half-after Tacitus and wrote his book in 121, nearly a century after the death of Jesus.

But, the most worst of the lot as a credible source is Justin Martyr. Justin Martyr wasn’t even born until 100, 6 years after Josephus had published Antiquities of the Jews. The “Acts of Pontius Pilate” he referred to were not missing court documents, as the Watchtower Society claims, but rather a book that was used by the Christian church in his day that was not included in the Christian scriptures when they were finalized over the next century or so. The reason it wasn’t included is because it is a 2nd century forgery filled with outlandish tales that nobody took particularly seriously. The text of much of the Acts of Pilate was included in another extra-Biblical book, the Gospel of Nicodemus. Justin the Martyr was appealing to a book as an auth
ority that the Christian church itself would later reject as being too outlandish to be believable.

So is there anybody who wrote about Jesus when he was alive?

Nope.

Are there any first hand accounts of his life?

Nope.

Are there any contemporary secular records of any of the events of his life?

Nope.

Coming Up in Part 2 – Dating the Gospels and Absence of Evidence vs. Evidence of Absence… Stay Tuned!

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