Was Jesus a real historical person?

Question 60029.

Every so often someone tells me that the historical Jesus never existed, that He was invented by the early church out of older myths, and that the whole thing is a construction. It circulates online, appears in popular books, and lands in the inbox of Christian students at university with an air of scholarly authority.

It is worth saying at the outset that this is not a live debate among historians of the period. Whatever they believe about His claims, specialists in first century Judea regard the existence of Jesus of Nazareth as about as secure as anything we know from that world. Let me show you why.

Who actually holds the myth theory

The idea that no such person existed is a fringe position, held almost entirely by writers outside the relevant academic field. Among historians of antiquity, including Jewish, agnostic and atheist scholars with no interest in defending Christianity, the existence of the historical Jesus is treated as an established fact and the argument moves on to what He said and did.

That is not an appeal to authority meant to close down thinking. It is a warning about proportion. If a claim is confidently made online but has no purchase among the people who spend their careers on the primary sources, the first question to ask is why not.

What the Roman sources say

Tacitus, the most respected Roman historian of his era and no friend of Christians, records in his Annals that the movement took its name from Christus, who suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of the procurator Pontius Pilate, and that the pernicious superstition broke out again not only in Judea but in Rome. He is explaining the fire of Rome in 64, and he has no reason whatever to help the Christian case.

Pliny the Younger, writing to the Emperor Trajan around 112 about how to handle Christians in his province, describes them meeting before dawn and singing a hymn to Christ as to a god. Suetonius mentions disturbances in Rome at the instigation of Chrestus. None of these men are witnesses to the resurrection, and none of them are trying to be. They are hostile or indifferent observers noting that this movement existed and that it traced itself to a named executed founder.

What the Jewish sources say

Josephus, the Jewish historian writing in the 90s, mentions Jesus twice. The second reference is the more useful, describing the execution of James, the brother of Jesus who was called Christ, in an incidental aside about a high priest overstepping his authority. The earlier and longer passage has clearly been touched up by a later Christian copyist, and I would rather say so than pretend otherwise, but the scholarly consensus is that an original core stands underneath the additions.

The rabbinic material is hostile and later, but it too assumes the man existed, referring to his execution and to charges of sorcery and leading Israel astray. That is a notable pattern across the ancient sources. The opponents of the movement attack what Jesus did and who He claimed to be. Not one of them says that no such man ever lived, which would have been the simplest refutation available.

The Christian sources are historical sources

There is a strange assumption that the New Testament does not count because it is religious. Historians do not work that way with any other body of evidence. What we have here is a collection of documents written within a few decades of the events, in the lifetime of witnesses, in and around the places concerned.

Luke anchors his account in datable public life, opening with the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and naming tetrarchs and high priests. Paul’s letters are earlier still, and in 1 Corinthians 15 he lists witnesses and notes that most of them are still alive, which is an invitation to check. Before Agrippa he says that this was not done in a corner. That is the language of public events, not of myth.

The details nobody would invent

If you were constructing a saviour figure for a first century Jewish audience, you would not make him a Galilean from Nazareth, an obscure village with no prophetic pedigree, which is why the objection appears in John’s Gospel itself. You would not have him executed by crucifixion, the most shameful death Rome could administer. You would not have his family think he was out of his mind, or have his chief apostle deny him, or have women as the first witnesses to the empty tomb.

Historians call this the criterion of embarrassment, and it is one of the reasons the accounts of the historical Jesus read as reportage rather than construction. Legends tidy up. These documents preserve the awkward material, including the failures of the men who ended up leading the movement.

Compared with what we accept elsewhere

Put the evidence beside other figures from the period. We accept a great deal about Tiberius, Hannibal or Alexander on the basis of sources written far longer after the events, surviving in a handful of late manuscripts. For the historical Jesus we have multiple independent accounts within living memory, a network of letters, hostile external corroboration, and a manuscript tradition unmatched in the ancient world.

Anyone applying to the historical Jesus a standard strict enough to rule Him out has, by the same stroke, emptied most of ancient history. That is not scepticism, it is a special rule invented for one case, and it is worth asking gently why the case needs its own rule. There is more on the documents themselves in when the four Gospels were written.

Why the idea persists anyway

Partly because it is a tidy solution. If He never existed, there is nothing to explain, no resurrection claim to weigh, no demand to answer. Partly because parallels with dying and rising gods sound impressive until you read the actual myths, which are set in a mythical past rather than under a named governor in a datable year, and which mostly postdate or differ sharply from the Christian claim.

And partly because existence is not the real question. Establishing that the historical Jesus lived settles very little on its own. It clears the ground so that the harder question can be asked, which is what to make of a man who forgave sins in His own name and whose followers were prepared to die saying they had seen Him alive. That is where I have set out the evidence in what the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is.

Why the historical Jesus matters

Christianity is unusual among the world religions in being this vulnerable to history. You could remove the founder from most philosophical systems and the teaching would stand on its own, because the ideas do not depend on the man. Take the historical Jesus out of Christianity and there is nothing left to teach, because what we proclaim is not a philosophy but an event involving a person.

That is a risk, and the New Testament takes it deliberately. Luke writes to Theophilus so that he may have certainty concerning the things he has been taught. Peter insists that they did not follow cleverly devised myths but were eyewitnesses. John opens his letter with hands and eyes and ears. These men are not offering a spirituality; they are giving testimony, and testimony can be examined and found false.

It has not been found false, and that is worth resting on. The historical Jesus is not a doctrine the church invented and must now defend; He is a man who ate fish in front of frightened friends and who told them to go and tell everybody. Our faith is anchored in something that happened, at a place you can visit, under a governor whose name is carved in stone.

So the enquiry is worth making properly. Ask the hard questions of the sources, weigh what the hostile witnesses concede, and notice what the earliest documents actually claim. A faith that rests on an event has nothing to lose from careful examination and a great deal to lose from being treated as a private feeling.

So, now what?

If someone puts this to you, you do not need to be flustered by it. Ask them which historians hold that view, and what they make of Tacitus and Josephus. Then move the conversation to where it actually belongs, because nobody’s life is changed by conceding that a man existed.

And if you are the one with the doubts, take the primary documents rather than the arguments about them. Read Luke’s Gospel through in a sitting, with the questions you actually have. The historical Jesus is not a figure who needs protecting from investigation. He has survived rather a lot of it.

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee… the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the wilderness.

Luke 3:1 to 2 (ESV)